What Should IBM’s Watson Do Now?

IBM's supercomputer has finished its tour of duty on Jeopardy. Now what?

Recently, the world watched a computer named Watson take on two of Jeopardy's greatest champions. Its opponents were Ken Jennings, the man who won 74 straight games on Jeopardy, and Brad Rutter, who won over $3.4 million in prize money. While imperfect, Watson won the three-day battle with the humans. So, now that all of the hoopla is over, what should IBM do with Watson next?

In order to figure out where Watson should go next, we first need to examine what Watson can actually do. Watson is one impressive super-computer made up of over 2,800 servers complete with terabytes of RAM. The machine can perform thousands of language analysis algorithms simultaneously in order to determine the correct answer to a question. In other words, it's the perfect Jeopardy contestant.

And the game show didn't have to make any concessions to the way the game is played. Watson was able to "activate" a buzzer and respond in question format. So yes, Watson can play the game of Jeopardy, but is it designed to handle tasks outside of this environment?

Watson is the product of years of research and an untold amount of money, but its feature set seems very narrowly tailored. Does that mean the supercomputer is doomed to just gather dust? No, Watson will get a second life working at the Columbia University Medical Center and then the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

These ought to be great experiments, but we at PCMag have come up with some other career options for the Jeopardy-winning supercomputer, in case its medical career doesn't take off. Check out all what we think Watson should do next in the slideshow.

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